Diseases and Accidents If the body is ill, does the mind too fall ill? NOT necessarily, to .be sure. Illnesses are, as I have told you, generally a dislocation among the different parts of the being, a kind of disharmony. It may well be that the body has not followed the movement of progress, it might have lagged behind while the other parts have, on the contrary, made progress. In that case there is an unbalance, a breaking of harmony and that produces an illness, I mean, in the body, for the mind and the vital also might remain all right. There are many people who have been ill for years, suffering from terrible and incurable diseases, and still maintained th

Some Conceptions and Misconceptions A QUESTION is asked, where, at what stage or level of Involution does the principle of exclusive concentration (the principle of Ignorance) come in? If, as Sri Aurobindo says, it comes subsequently at a later stage, where was it then before? Was it not in the Absolute Reality itself? There can be nothing that is not inherent in the Absolute Reality. We all know, nothing comes out of nothing. Then, if it is in the original Reality already, why should it come out at a later stage and not be active from the very beginning? This standpoint seems to have been anticipated by some schools (Visishtadwaita Vedanta, for example)

Mysticism and Occultism MYSTICISM is more or less an emotional relation with what one feels to be a Divine Power – it is a relation very intimate, emotive and intense with something invisible which one takes for the Divine. Occultism is the knowledge of invisible forces and the power to handle them. It is a science, altogether a science. I always compare occultism with chemistry or physics; for occult knowledge is very much like scientific knowledge, only science deals with material objects and forces, while occultism deals with invisible entities and energies, their potentials of combination and association. And as by your chemical or physical knowledge you control

The Nature and Destiny of Art TRUE art means the expression of beauty in the material world. In a world wholly converted, that is to say, expresssing integrally the divine reality, art must serve as the revealer and teacher of this divine beauty in life. In other words, the artist must be able to enter into communion with the Divine and receive the inspiration as to what should be the form or forms for the material realisation of the divine beauty. At the same time, in expressing true beauty in the physical, he also sets an example, becomes an instrument of education... Art not only creates beauty, but educates the taste of people to find true beauty, the ess

Children and Child Mentality, CHILDREN are often found to be very cruel to animals. Why is it so? Their treatment of birds especially is notorious. To seek out nests and pull them down, to capture nestlings and put them to all kinds of torture, to pick up eggs and dash them to pieces are for children most interesting games. They seem to take particular delight in varying and enhancing as much as possible the torture they can inflict. One reason that can be adduced for the callousness of a child's sensibility is his self-centredness: he is wholly himself, isolated from others, has not yet learnt the social needs and virtues. All he does and feels is for himself

PART TWO Our Ideal OUR ideal – the ideal of Sri Aurobindo – we may say without much ado, is to divinise the human, immortalise the mortal, spiritualise the material. Is the ideal possible? Is it practicable? Our task will be precisely, first of all, to show that it is possible, next that it is probable and finally that it is inevitable. Now to the first question. It is usually contended that the ideal is an impossibility, a chimera, since it involves on the face of it a self-contradiction. For, is not divinity the very opposite of humanity, immortality that of mortality and Matter that of the Spirit? These pairs, all of them, are formed of two mutually exclusive terms. Th

Things Significant and Insignificant ALL things are insignificant in ordinary life. The thoughts you think, the actions you do, the feelings you experience, all your movements have no significance at all, they possess no value. They belong to the superficial part of your being, they come and pass away, like ripples on the sea, leaving no trace or effect in the depths. Only at a rare moment, if ever you come in contact with a corner of your soul, if something of that inmost consciousness touches or gazes at any limb of yours, that flash of a moment is the only significant thing that happens in the midst of all the useless mass that is your life. This is the

To Learn and to Understand IT is one thing to learn (apprendre), quite another to understand (comprendre). In learning you take in a thing by your surface mind and it is a thing that comes in from outside like a foreign body; it is put into you, almost driven and thrust into you. You do not absorb it, make it wholly your own. If you are not mindful, leave it aside for sometime, it goes clean out of your memory. Understanding a thing, on the other hand, means, you absorb it, get it into the stuff of your being, you live it in your consciousness within. When you have understood a thing you never forget it; it has become an element of your consciousness. Years and year

The Inner and the Outer THE external part of the being is turned to the Divine: you are conscious of your ideal and as much as possible you conform your behaviour to it. You appear what you want to be. But just behind the line, on the other side of your consciousness – ­in the subconscious, as it is called – the picture is different. The light has not touched there: the movements go the other way. Things – thoughts, impulses, feelings – hide which you would not like to own. Not that you consciously and deli­berately hide them: but they are there as inevitable part and parcel of the original ordinary nature. They form the backyard of the consciousness; there are all k

-024_The Soul^s Odyssey.htm The Soul's Odyssey Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home ¹: . . . RARELY has a poet – a secular poet, I mean – given utterance to deep spiritual and occult truth with such clarity and felicity. It is, however, quite open to doubt whether Wordsworth himself was fully cognisant of the truth he expressed; the words that were put into his mouth carry a significance and a symbolism considerably beyond what his mind seemed to